The general reaction within the Agile world was naturally strongly positive. Finally, mainstream management is getting it. “Next step -> Rule the World!” wrote @lateralus009.

There was somewhat less enthusiasm from the traditional management camp to having the world ruled by Agile. The most complete—and revealing—response from the traditional management camp came from a link submitted by PM Hut and written by Bruno Collet: The Limitations of Agile Software Development. The defenders of traditional management claim to be unafraid of being tagged as “behind”, “old school” or “just plain stupid”: traditional IT professionals know that “Agile has limitations.”

1. “Agile is only for stars”

“Agile was designed for experienced, smart, and high-achieving people like its creators, i.e. stars. You could give them any project, with any method, and they would succeed. Not every group can be motivated, experienced, and skilled enough to self-organize into an efficient team. We have to work with the staff we have. They need close supervision. So Agile is not for us.”

In other words, make do with mediocrity. Learn to live with the people who are either not experienced or smart or high-achieving. Hierarchical bureaucracy makes an assumption of incompetence and expects mediocre performance. It learns to live with mediocrity on a permanent basis, in the process creating—not surprisingly—the need for the layers middle managers to provide the "close supervision".

Agile makes the opposite assumption: competence. It expects performance and forces action if it doesn’t occur. It assumes a workforce who know what they are doing and provides a transparent framework for them to show what they can do. If the group doesn’t deliver at the end of each short cycle, then that is painfully apparent to everyone—immediately, not years later when the project runs out of money and the software doesn’t work. Agile is a way of forcing either high performance or change.

Agile squeezes out mediocrity and requires high-performance. Hierarchical bureaucracy breeds incompetence and feeds off mediocrity: the organization performs accordingly. Faced with the choice between high-performance and the mediocrity, traditional management opts for mediocrity.

2. “Agile doesn’t fit our organizational culture”

“Agile is fine for startups run by kids with earrings, tattoos and blue hair. But in our firm, respecting the chain of command and job responsibility are keys to survival. It takes a couple of days just to go through the company’s policy manual. The narrow responsibilities, and rigid policies, processes, and one-size-fits-all methodologies of our firm don’t fit the free-wheeling ways of Agile. Agile isn't going to work here.”

Precisely. What’s wrong here is the corporate culture, not Agile. Surviving in today’s marketplace requires individual and team freedom. It translates into cross-functional work that is constantly adapting, with roles switching as needed. It also mewans adjusting processes continuously to reflect the current situation.

In Agile, processes are secondary to the requirements of the work. Bureaucracy is the opposite: the requirements of the work—and the customer—are secondary to the bureaucracy. Not surprisingly, firms in this mode do a poor job of meeting customers’ needs.

When the culture doesn’t fit Agile, the solution is not to reject Agile. The solution is to change the organizational culture. One doesn’t even have to look at the business results of firms using hierarchical bureaucracy to know that they are fatally ill. In today’s marketplace, they will need to change their culture or they will die. They need to become Agile.

3. “Agile only works for small projects and our projects are big”

“Teams larger than eight are too big to be Agile. We are a large organization with large projects so Agile won’t work for us.”

"Agile emphasizes that face-to-face, spontaneous conversation is the best form of communication. In some organizations, this isn’t possible. Moreover, work extends beyond the development team since other stakeholders such as business analysts also require interaction. Hence this limits the applicability of Agile."

While it’s true that co-location is obviously ideal for Agile teams, where staff are dispersed, teams can use technology maintain open and continuous communication.

The reality is that distributed software development using Agile can be highly productive, as firms like Xebia have shown. See also the Larman/Vodde book for more discussion of distributed Agile teams.

5. “Agile lacks project management processes”

“Most agile methodologies do not define any project management processes. Whether we’re agile or not, we need to manage project scope, planning, budgets, strategies, and reporting. So Agile can’t be the answer.”

As Bruno Collet helpfully points out, “Unless you choose an agile methodology that encompasses all needed processes, you should combine it with a methodology that define these processes and rely on agile for day-to-day team management.”

6. “Our firm’s individual accountability systems don’t fit Agile”

“Agile development stresses the importance of team ownership in order to improve teamwork and therefore overall results. But how can we implement team ownership when our organization’s performance-reward system assesses individual performance and rewards individuals, not teams?”

The answer is pretty simple: change the organization’s reward system. They are the problem, not Agile.

7. “Agile is just a fad”

“Here we go again. Another silver bullet! Another panacea! Another management fad!”

Again, let’s be clear. The article didn’t say that Agile was “the” solution to everything. It’s not a panacea. It’s not a silver bullet. What the article said was that Agile is the solution to a particular problem, namely, reconciling disciplined execution with creativity and innovation.

One important aspect concerns the goal of the organization. Agile teams that work in organizations where the goal is maximizing shareholder value are ultimately just as doomed as teams practicing waterfall. Sooner or later, the money-driven culture will crush even the successful Agile teams. Genuine Agile involves re-thinking the goal of the entire organization in terms of adding value to customers sooner.

8. “There are better ideas than Agile”

One critic said, “Introducing these ideas to management via the path of Agile software development doesn’t make sense. Much more interesting would be to introduce these ideas via things that make sense to non-software managers, such as beyond budgeting, complexity thinking, lean management and rightshifting.”

Ignoring the management experience of thousands of software development teams around the world is what doesn’t make sense. A better idea is a better idea, even if it comes from the “wrong” people.

The approaches of beyond budgeting, complexity thinking, lean management and rightshifting are helpful and obviously related to Agile software development, but it’s not obvious that they are having any more real success in changing the basic command-and-control paradigm of traditional management.

Rather than fighting internecine battles (e.g. Lean is better than Agile or Kanban is superior to Scrum), it would be more useful to see the commonalities in these various movements and join forces to get real transformation of traditional management.

9. “Nothing new here”

All of the individual components of Agile have been around for quite a long time. What is new is to put those elements together in a coherent and integrated fashion as in radical management.

10. “Not a fair comparison?”

“How can you possibly compare Agile to the discovery of longitude?” was one agitated answer to the first article which cited the historical examples where path-breaking ideas were rejected by the experts for decades, such as the sad experience of John Harrison who despite the scientists discovered a way to measure longitude.

Let’s be clear, first, that John Harrison, the Yorkshire carpenter, didn’t “discover longitude”. The British scientists of the 18th Century knew all about longitude. What they didn’t know was how ships’ captains could measure longitude in the middle of the oceans. They could measure latitude from the stars, but they couldn’t seem to find a way to read the stars so as to get a handle on longitude. So the scientists spent decades studying the stars trying to find the secret that “must be there”.

What John Harrison figured out was that the answer didn’t lie in the stars: the solution lay in having an accurate clock. With an accurate clock, you could take a reading from the sun at noon and figure out your longitude. The problem was that there weren’t any clocks accurate throughout a long voyage. So Harrison set out to invent one. When he had done it and shown that it worked on the long voyage from London to Jamaica, the scientists went apoplectic. They were upset that the solution to the problem didn’t lie in the fancy astronomy of the heavens that they had been studying for decades: it lay right under their noises with a simple clock. Very annoying!

In their frustration, the scientists refused to concede that they had been wrong and give John Harrison his well-deserved prize. It took an act of parliament—in effect, ordinary citizens—to give him his recompense: equivalent to over a million pounds in today’s money.

What’s annoying about Agile to control-minded management practitioners and theorists is that it recognizes that the problem lies is control itself. The solution to reconciling disciplined execution and innovation lies in giving greater freedom to those people doing the work to exercise their talents and creativity, but doing so within short cycles so that those doing the work can themselves see whether they are making progress or not.

Even worse for hierarchical bureaucracy, Agile thrives on transparency. One of the dirty not-so-little secrets of traditional management is that control thrives on non-transparency. So introducing (real) Agile means exposing all of the non-transparent tricks that hierarchical managers play on their subordinates to maintain power. Is it any wonder that Agile isn’t naturally popular with the command-and-control gang?